JobU

JobU (Job Orchestration and Broker Utility) is a portable C++20 service for running scheduled command-line and HTTP jobs in the background. It provides independently managed queues, retries and timeouts, recurring jobs, execution history, and output capture. jobuctl communicates with the jobud daemon through a local JSON-RPC API over a Unix-domain socket, and SQLite provides persistence.

Important

JobU is under active development and is not ready for production use.

Components

• jobud — the background daemon that hosts queues, schedules jobs, and executes them. It exposes a local JSON-RPC API over a Unix-domain socket.
• jobuctl — the command-line client for managing queues and jobs through jobud.

Supported platforms

• Ubuntu 24.04
• Alpine Linux 3.22
• macOS with Apple Clang and Homebrew dependencies

Windows is not a runtime target.

Requirements

Building JobU requires CMake 3.20 or newer, a C++20 compiler, fmt, SQLite, libcurl 7.85 or newer, nlohmann/json, Catch2 3.x, OpenSSL for tests, and Ninja or another CMake-supported build tool.

Linux command execution requires a libc providing _Fork(), kernel pidfd support, and PR_SET_NO_NEW_PRIVS. macOS command execution uses kqueue process watches and public fork().

Ubuntu 24.04

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --yes --no-install-recommends \
    catch2 cmake g++ libcurl4-openssl-dev libfmt-dev libssl-dev libsqlite3-dev \
    ninja-build nlohmann-json3-dev

Alpine Linux 3.22

Alpine does not ship sudo by default, so run the following as root (or install sudo first):

apk add --no-cache \
    catch2-3 cmake curl-dev fmt-dev g++ nlohmann-json openssl-dev samurai sqlite-dev tzdata

macOS

Install the Xcode Command Line Tools and Homebrew, then install the build dependencies:

xcode-select --install
brew install catch2 cmake curl fmt ninja nlohmann-json openssl@3 sqlite

Homebrew's curl formula may be keg-only. If CMake selects the system curl instead, configure with -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="$(brew --prefix curl)" to select the Homebrew installation without hard-coding its architecture-specific path.

Build and test

Clone the repository and move into its root:

git clone https://github.com/evaikene/deferra.git
cd deferra

Configure, build, and test:

cmake -S . -B .bld -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug
cmake --build .bld
ctest --test-dir .bld/test --output-on-failure

The SQLite driver is enabled by default and is required to build jobud. Disable it when only the backend-independent libraries and jobuctl are needed:

cmake -S . -B .bld -G Ninja \
    -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug \
    -DJB_BUILD_SQLITE_DRIVER=OFF
cmake --build .bld

Run JobU

Start jobud with a local socket and SQLite database path:

.bld/src/jobud/jobud --socket /tmp/jobud.sock --database ./jobu.sqlite

Use jobuctl with the same socket to manage queues and jobs. For example, create a queue and schedule a one-shot command (replace the timestamp with the desired UTC time):

.bld/src/jobuctl/jobuctl --socket /tmp/jobud.sock queue create commands
.bld/src/jobuctl/jobuctl --socket /tmp/jobud.sock job create \
    --queue-name commands --type cli --at 2030-01-01T12:00:00Z \
    --command /usr/bin/printf --arg '%s\n' --arg 'hello from JobU'

Commands and arguments are passed directly as an argv array; JobU does not perform shell parsing or expansion. Use an absolute executable path, or set an explicit PATH with --env PATH=/usr/bin:/bin for a bare command name.

Run jobud --help or jobuctl --help to see the available options.

AI-supported development experiment

JobU is also an experiment in incremental, AI-supported software development: changes are designed, reviewed, built, and tested in small steps. Design documents are available in docs/planning.

License

JobU is released under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.